And I’m going to tell you, some of those boys were brought directly from the backwoods, where the sheriff’s department had to go out and tell them they were wanted for the army. And those boys would grab their rifles and say, “Who we fightin’ this time, the Yankees?” So when they got to Atlanta, they thought they’d been captured already.
Then they called me one day and said, “You got a high grade on this intelligence test when you came in, so you can choose what you are going to do. Here’s the list. These are the fields in which we are desperate. You can check off your preferences one, two, three, what you’d like to study, go and do.” Of course, it was radar, chemical warfare, bomb making, it was dah, dah, and cryptography. And when I saw cryptography, I thought Edgar Allan Poe and “The Gold-Bug”! So I put that for first choice, and they said, “Oh, nobody asks for that for first choice,” and they sent me right off to the Pauling Institute in upstate New York. And going from Fort McPherson, Georgia, to a group of high IQs at Pauling, New York, two hours north of New York City, was another cultural shift.
And that was terrific. They were short of cryptographers in every theater of war. And we had to cram. I mean cram, cram, cram. We got up at six and went straight into class because you had to memorize combinations of numbers, combinations of phrases, and combinations of letters that made no sense. They had to be in your brain. You had to have the thing to decode in your brain. I had to know which one nulls and which were live and which to use only in great emergency, and which were the ones that gave you the code for the day. Then we began learning these complex machineries. I don’t think I’m breaking security because they’ve changed the name by this time, but there was one called the Cigarbo. And I just loved it.
I wasn’t very good at the training. We had an old West Point fool general, who had been in the First World War, running this academy. He said, you know, twirling his white mustache on this bright red face, “All boys need some discipline. You can’t have those boys sitting around at the Cigarbo all day and learning those things they learn out of books. They need some exercise. Get out in the snow and have some maneuvers out in the snow.” He loved to play war games. When he led us in these charges, we used rotten potatoes for hand grenades. He had bags of rotten potatoes. We’d be out in the snow, charging through the snow, throwing rotten potatoes after we’d gotten up from our Cigarbo machines.
Alabama Meets Alabama
After I’d passed all my cryptography exams, I was allowed a weekend in New York. So I caught that train through the snow, through the slushy streets of New York, and I went right away to the Plymouth Theater. Because two weeks earlier, the Thornton Wilder play
Skin of Our Teeth
had opened. With Tallulah Bankhead in the starring role. And on the train with me, coming from some other radio school or something, I heard this boy who was in a private’s uniform just as I. And I said, “What part of the South are you from?” He said, “I’m from Greensboro, Alabama.” I said, “That’s not too far away from where I live.” So we went together to the theater. He’d never been anywhere. So I went to the box office and I said, “I declare, I know it’s pretty late to get seats for tonight, but we are from Alabama and we just love Miss Tallulah.” And she looked at me and found two tickets. I’ve always said, if you can’t put your southernisms to good use, don’t use them at all.
Then I wrote a note and gave it to the usher, a very charming older lady, at intermission. It said, “Dear Miss Tallulah, I’m from Mobile, Alabama, and you might remember my name. I’m a friend of the Sledges.” That was old Dr. Sledge. And see, Tallulah’s mother was Eugenia Sledge. The old doctor was a first cousin of Eugenia. And I said, “I’d love just to come backstage and say hello afterward.” I signed it “Private Eugene Walter.” When the show was over and I was in the lobby, the usher to whom I had given the note was waiting for me. She said, “Miss Bankhead would be delighted to see you. Just go on backstage. Send in your name.” So I went backstage, and oh, you know, what a thrill to go in that alley. Just the idea of the stage door. New York, New York.
I was met by a snotty doorman who said, “No, no, no.” And I said, “Miss Bankhead is expecting me. I’m from Alabama.” He said, “Oh.” So I went in and there were all these high-ranking naval officers and some very distinguished older people there. I stood very shyly with my new friend from Greensboro right there in the corner behind these navy officers who were very know-it-all types.
Suddenly this English lady appeared at the top of the stairs. You could tell she was English because she was wearing a tweed skirt that had a pleat with little inner pleats in it. And a sweater set in a pale color and one string of pearls. Her hair was in a thirties sort of bob. And no makeup except a little bit of rouge. She appeared at the top, and now I won’t swear that she had a lorgnette, but it was the impression of one. Maybe she just extended her glasses to read this note, but maybe she did have a little lorgnette. She said, “Is Private Walter here? If you’ll come this way, sir.” Then they parted like the Red Sea. Or the navy blue sea. And I went through, you know, “Excuse me, excuse me,” as I went up the stairs. I allowed myself to turn and look over my shoulder and go ha-ha-ha to those officers.
Then I went in, and there she was. With this honey-colored hair. She was one of the one-hundred-brush-strokes-a-night Southern girls. And it shone. It shone. And she had these twinkling eyes, and she still had her cheekbones. She said something like “Good evening, darling. Did you enjoy the show?”
And I said, “Oh, Miss Tallulah, I did enjoy the show.” In the second act she runs down the aisle for her first entrance, you see. It’s the convention of the Rotary or something in Atlantic City, and she is a bathing beauty. She runs down the aisle of the theater in this red bathing suit, twirling this red umbrella. I said, “Oh, Miss Tallulah, when this show is over, you ought to send that red umbrella to the state of Alabama because we ought to make a shrine over that like they made over Buddha’s tooth in Ceylon.”
She went, “Ho-ho-ho.” She was behind a little screen getting into slacks and a blouse. She said, “I’ll give you—ho-ho-ho—something much better for the shrine.” Woh, woh, woh. And she gave me three pubic hairs. One of which I still have. I traded one for a beautiful leather-bound translation of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
by various people like Addison, Ben Jonson, et cetera, et cetera, printed by the very famous Jacob Thompson, the famous typographer and bookbinder. I traded one pubic hair to an Englishman for that book. I’ve forgotten what I traded the other one for. The last one is in my reliquary by Zev. It’s got the horn of the last known unicorn that was killed the day Voltaire was born. And in the bottom, I have a 1926 rare English porcelain of a lady with a bob and striped pajamas. It’s called
First Cigarettes.
She’s smoking her first cigarette. Inside that porcelain, inside a plastic bit, is that pubic hair of Tallulah. When you go over there you feel this warmth. I get the electricity.
I saw her again after the war. It was 1946. I went to the theater and sent her a note, and again she received me. And this is the image I really retain of her. It was snowing outside—she didn’t have a hat. She was wearing black velvet slacks and a white satin blouse and a big mink thrown over her shoulders. She never put her arms in the sleeves. And this honey-colored hair was full of snowflakes. She was going to a party, and I was going to meet some friends at a restaurant nearby. So I was going to escort her to her limousine. We were just chatting away about Alabama. And we looked down Shubert Alley, and at the other end of Shubert Alley, there was the Salvation Army girl with her tambourine, her scarf, and her hat with the bonnet, freezing to death, and she had this tripod with a little cauldron covered with chicken wire. Tallulah said, “Oh, my God. Come with me, darling.” We went all the way down Shubert Alley. She reached into her slacks’ pocket and pulled out a wad of dollar bills and stuck them in there. And she said to the Salvation Army girl, “There, there, darling, I know it’s been a perfectly ghastly season for you Spanish dancers.” I just loved it.
The last time I saw her was at a party in New York. It was an interesting group of people, actors and dancers and all that. And Thelma Carpenter was there, the black singer who comes from someplace up the road from Jasper, Alabama, where Tallulah comes from. Tallulah had never met her. She’d never met Tallulah. And they just fell into each other’s arms, you know. “Oh, Possum Hollow. Oh, Boogaloo Junction. Oh, Jasper. Oh, Coconut.” And all that. Alabama meets Alabama. Tallulah was being escorted by this Harvard boy. I don’t think he was a football player, but he was a big Harvard boy with wide shoulders and beautifully tailored clothes. Just smelling of money. A young guy. He kept saying, “You know, oh come on, Tallulah, you said we’d go to your place, come on, Tallulah.” He was just itching. She said, “I lived for many years near Jasper, but the family house was not in Jasper.” Then Thelma said, “Well, I went to high school in Possum Hollow, you know.” This boy was sitting there going mad, and finally Tallulah said, “Oh, darling.” She carried a little purse just like the queen of England—basics. I thought, Well, she’s got a few thousand-dollar bills and a little mother-of-pearl comb, and a lipstick, and that’s all she’s got in there. She opened it up, click, and took out a bunch of keys, and said, “Here, darling, you go on over to my place. If I’m not there in an hour, start without me.”
But you see, they made Tallulah what is called camp. She was not. She was a Southern lady who was frank in her speech. As real Southern ladies always were. All the puritanism came late in the game. And you see, Tallulah used to come to Mobile on the sly every two or three years and buy cases and cases of this one postcard showing azaleas blooming at the entrance of the Bankhead Tunnel. She used to send that to everybody on earth for Christmas. They never knew that there was a tunnel here named for her father or uncle, whichever it was. They thought it was some bawdry that she’d invented. Bankhead Tunnel. Anyway, she was a great actress. And an elegant Southern lady with a down-to-earth quality. She really was a marvelous creature.
Writing in the Snow
Well, as I said, they were short of cryptographers in every theater of war, so they told me I could have my choice. “Send me to the eastern theater,” I said. “I have cousins in every country of Europe. But I have no black or Japanese cousins.” So I went to Seattle. And I was issued tropical equipment, camouflage costumes and green and brown makeup to wear in the jungle. I thought, What fun, I’ll have a fern leaf here, and a bramblebush there. But unh-unh. As we were going toward the gangplank, we quietly checked all of our tropical equipment and were given parkas instead. We went off on this eight-day cruise up the inland waterway to Alaska. It was a ploy so various underground intelligence would not know that a large body of soldiers was going to the Arctic Circle and Alaska.
So then I went right away to Elmendorf Field, the airport at Anchorage, Alaska, where they broke in the graduate cryptographers. Everybody monitored every single thing you did to see if you did it right. You were monitored for a month before you were turned loose. And you were turned loose on simple things like encoded supplies. They never told how many boxes of Coca-Cola they were ordering because they didn’t want the Japanese to know how many soldiers were drinking Coca-Cola. I graduated from supplies to very high command and then to inventing air-ground codes, which had to change every hour because the Japanese were very clever at breaking the codes. When I was out in the Aleutian Islands, I was in intelligence, specifically air-land codes for airplanes, bombardiers, and all. There were three categories of information—secret, confidential, and restricted—and I dealt with all three.
I used the second line of Mother Goose rhymes always for codes that only lasted an hour. And I always liked “its fleece was white as snow.” Then the person in the plane knew to jumble up “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And then take his secret code and take every third letter from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” after he’d unscrambled it.
*
One day at Anchorage I met this poor little guy off a minesweeper. He was crying. He had this little adorable puppy he’d found wandering around the pier in San Francisco. It must have been three months old by then, this little fur thing. You couldn’t see which end was which. It was just this gray-and-white fur and these curls. I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He said, “The commander of the minesweeper said if I come back on the ship with this animal, I’ll be court-martialed.” Some real shitface second lieutenant, of course. So I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll take it. I’ll find a way. I’ll do something.” And of course, I smuggled it in. That animal was clever. It knew to make no noise. That became my beloved Ragzina Gadzooks. A Maltese terrier. She went everyplace with me, the Arctic Circle, the Aleutian Islands.
*
On that island where I was most of the time, Atka, one of the four big islands of the Andreanof between Siberia and Alaska, I mean the wind blew. In the three years I was there, I saw the sun five times, five days. It was fog, mist eternally, and the wind called the williwaw, that blows straight from the north. And you walk against it, you lean on it. Then if you are coming away from it, you have to crawl. I worked in this underground vault that was bombproof, where we had our Cigarbos and our various machines and somebody who would relay the Morse code messages from the place with an area where they received the Morse code. There’s not a whole lot more I can say about it, because when I left they made me swear on the Bible and the Constitution and Emily Post that I would never reveal confidential information.
We lived six each in these Quonset huts that were buried—an underground dugout. Down these steps into an underground hole. They were camouflaged with tundra grass. And the eternal wind—you heard that wind day and night. The tour of duty was six months: it was considered a hardship post. A lot of people were suicidal, and there were suicides; some boys didn’t even finish their six months. But I was there three years. I volunteered to stay on because for me it was exotic. I mean, it was so unlike Mobile. As a Southerner, I had never had that cultural advantage of writing in the snow with the fountain pen. Yankee boys get to write in the snow. So I liked to go and write words, peeing in the snow late at night. Dirty words. When I was a child, it snowed once in Alabama, and they closed all the schools instantly, so the children could just go out and go aah. Of course, the snow melted as soon as it hit the ground. But I saw real heaps of snow in Alaska. And everybody else was saying woo, and I was saying: That dry cold. There was a part of my lungs I had never used before. I didn’t realize I had an antechamber and a back room in my lungs. I loved it. And there was no marching. There were no calisthenics. There was no saluting. I’d had basic training, six weeks of shooting rifles at targets and left, left, left…Forward, march. Turn left. Present arms. Clack. And I just loathed it.